BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Architectural historian Despina Stratigakos, an
award-winning scholar of modern German architecture, is at work on
the first in-depth study of the aesthetic and ideological
constructions of the "domestic" Adolf Hitler and the uses to which
they were put by propagandists of the Third Reich.

She has received a prestigious two-year Marie Curie Fellowship
from Germany's Gerda Henkel Foundation, to support her ongoing
research and writing of the book, "Hitler at Home" (forthcoming
from Yale University Press).

Stratigakos, PhD, an associate professor in the department of
architecture at the University at Buffalo, says "Hitler at Home"
will span the fields of architectural history, social history and
politics and explore how the Fuhrer's domestic spaces -- which
reveal a great deal about his self-conception -- became a part of
the national cultural imagination and were used to launder his
image in Germany and abroad.

"My goal with this book is to demonstrate how power can manifest
itself in seemingly innocuous architecture and how Hitler
transformed his domestic space into an instrument of political
influence," says Stratigakos.

"Through the design of his homes we see how Hitler imagined his
private life, and how he positioned this self in relation to his
public identity," Stratigakos says, "as well as how intricately and
expertly the artists and propagandists of the regime interwove
these facets into a seductive whole.

"I am investigating the many ways in which Hitler's domestic
spaces were packaged to sell the Third Reich to the German people
and international audiences," she says.

Stratigakos says Hitler's homes were the result of his complex,
long-term collaboration with his designers and his
image-makers.

"Gerdy Troost could be called the interior decorator of the
Third Reich," she says, "and Hitler worked closely with her.
However, Hitler had a hand in every aspect of his home design and
decor. He is credited with designing the architecture and approved
the interior decoration, from the choice of fabric to the color
schemes and furniture." He also selected the art works from his
personal collection.

The elaborate, aggressive public theatrics of the massive Nazi
rallies held at the Nuremberg party grounds designed by Albert
Speer were carefully conceived to leave a distinct and lasting
impression of the Reich and Fuhrer as the all-powerful,
threatening, and untouchable leader of the German people.

"The staging of Hitler's domestic life, however, aimed to leave
an impression of Europe's worst nightmare as familiar, respectable,
and one of the people.

Stratigakos will focus on two domiciles: his luxury Munich
apartment, which was a private home sometimes used to impress
visitors but never seen by the public, and the Berghof, an Alpine
estate in the Obersalzberg crafted as the idealized German home
writ large -- a reflection of its principal inhabitant and his
racial fantasies.

The Berghof was a public stage upon which the domestic Hitler
lived amidst what was described as "soft greenery and snow white
cascades." Its rooms were famously said to be full of music, bowls
of fresh flowers, softly twittering Harz mountain canaries and
watercolor sketches by the Fuhrer himself.

"This presentation of a deer-petting, dog-loving,
child-friendly, country gentleman of artistic taste and gentle
demeanor," says Stratigakos, "was useful because it appeared to
contradict the accounts of violence and persecution coming out of
Germany. It was employed by Nazi propagandists in the 1930s to
disarm critics at home and abroad."

One way in which this was done, she said, was by promoting
Hitler in reassuring magazine and newspaper spreads published in
Germany and around the world. A testament to the Nazi PR effort,
these appeared long after Hitler's intentions toward world
domination were painfully obvious.

Stratigakos cites a notoriously obsequious article in a 1938
issue of Britain's Home and Gardens. Titled "Hitler's Mountain
Home," it described the Berghof in fawning detail as an elegant
paradise whose many charms reflected those of its creator, the
Fuhrer himself. Indeed, as late as October 1939 a Life magazine
spread on Hitler's artistic and design ambitions admired his
"tasteful" home.

It didn't end there, however.

Dozens of pastoral images of the beloved Berghof appeared on
contemporary postcards and were mailed by the thousands throughout
the world by Germans proud of the Fuhrer and his home. Many of the
postcards survive today, relics of the normalizing propaganda of
the Reich.

Publicity photos and newsreels showed Hitler entertaining heads
of state, international stars, diplomats and his own people at the
Berghof, backed by the startling Alpine landscape.

"So powerful was the propaganda surrounding Hitler at home,"
Stratigakos says, "that both the Berghof and the Munich apartment
were sites of fascination and public pilgrimage during Hitler's
lifetime and well beyond."

In fact, after the war, she says the West German government was
able to stop tourists or followers seeking out the apartment --
which the public had never even seen -- only by turning the entire
building into a police headquarters.

The charisma of the Berghof was another thing entirely.

"Thousands trekked to the Berghof during the 1930s to see the
place and catch a glimpse of Hitler and his cronies, some of whom
had homes on the estate," Stratigakos says, "and they continued to
come long after the estate was bombed, burned and virtually
destroyed through the efforts of the Allied forces and the post-war
German government."

Stratigakos says all of this testifies to the frightening power
and success of the Nazi campaign -- and Hitler's personal effort --
to represent this place and its principal inhabitant as the
benevolent heart of a new order.

Stratigakos is the author of the book "A Women's Berlin:
Building the Modern City," a history of a forgotten female
metropolis, which won the 2009 German Studies Association Book
Prize. She also has published extensively on issues of diversity in
the building industry, the public image of women architects,
connections between architectural and sexual discourses in Weimar
Germany, and exiled Jewish women architects in the United States.
She received her Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College and taught at Harvard
University and the University of Michigan before joining the
faculty at UB.

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